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Commerce Department unveils a national broadband inventory map
The National Broadband Map is a tool to search, analyze and map broadband availability across the United States. Created and maintained by the NTIA, in collaboration with the FCC, and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia. See also: Are You Being Served? National Broadband Map Going Live Today, By Chloe Albanesius, PC Magazine (February 17, 2011).
Users can search by address, view data on a map, or use other interactive tools to compare broadband across various geographies, such as states, counties or congressional districts. ..."The National Broadband Map shows there are still too many people and community institutions lacking the level of broadband service needed to fully participate in the Internet economy. We are pleased to see the increase in broadband adoption last year, particularly in light of the difficult economic environment, but a digital divide remains," [Larry] Strickling [assistant secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)] said in a statement.Continue reading
Conference: Common purpose for journalists and librarians
Beyond Books: News, Literacy, Democracy and Americas Libraries (BiblioNews) is a one-and-one-half-day convening April 6-7, 2011 at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., for journalists, librarians and citizens. This looks to be a really interesting conference! Please let us know if you are going and can blog about the event here. (Send mail to freegovinfo at gmail dot com )
For three centuries, in American towns large and small, two institutions have uniquely marked a commitment to participatory democracy, learning and open inquiry -- our libraries and our free press. Today, as their tools change, their common missions of civic engagement and information transparency converge. Economic and technology changes suggest an opportunity for collaboration among these two historic community information centers — one largely public, one largely private. How?Continue reading
The Googlization of Everything: Interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan
Siva Vaidhyanathan's new book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), is out. He finds a lot to like about Google, but also raises lots of questions about it. Among other things, he proposes a sprawling effort by libraries and like-minded institutions that would essentially give Googlers a public option. He discusses his ideas in an interview in Inside Higher Ed.
- Google's Gadfly: new book explains how google has taken over knowledge and learning, interview of Siva Vaidhyanathan by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed (February 16, 2011)
[Google] has contributed to the steady commercialization of higher education and the erosion of standards of information quality. Google is not a problem because it allegedly weakens our faculties. It's a problem because Google bakes biases into its algorithms. And we fail to recognize that fact. Most of the recent changes in Google's search algorithms make Google much better for shopping and much worse for learning....The same service cannot serve wisdom and wealth equally well. Fundamentally, we must recognize that some things are too important to be entrusted to unaccountable private actors. The Human Knowledge Project would be a 50-year public, global plan to design, legislate for, enable, and fund a global digital library service to deliver the best information to the most people. It's as feasible as it is desirable. In other words, if we don't do it it's because we don't really want it.Continue reading
Interesting: Provenance of eBooks
This is a bit off-topic, but so interesting that I couldn't resist mentioning it. James Moushon did a little investigation into the absence of basic provenance information in eBooks and what he discovered was not encouraging. He discovered that almost none of the eBooks he examined had any indication of "where the book's content originated from or how we got to the digital format." He asks, rhetorically, how we will be able to accurately cite eBooks and differentiate between editions.
- eBook Publishers: Are eBook Copyright Pages Missing Information?, by James Moushon, The Self-Publishing Review (February 15, 2011). I picked 30 ebooks and analyzed their copyright pages. Somebody must have missed the memo about what information is required and what format it should be presented in because we had a variety of formats and information, to say the least. Although 30 ebooks is not a very big sample, only one of them came close to what is needed to ID the source.
The Pentagon Papers To Be Declassified
Steven Aftergood reports today that the Pentagon Paper are to be declassified:
- Declassifying the Pentagon Papers, Finally, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (February 15th, 2011).
The National Declassification Center (NDC) at the National Archives will declassify the full text of the Pentagon Papers as well as the underlying documentation on which they are based, along with investigative material concerning the 1971 leak of the Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the NDC said yesterday.As we noted here recently, Steven recently pointed out that "every public and private library in the country that has a copy of the Papers is technically in possession of currently classified material." One has to wonder if the Pentagon Papers had been released digitally and not on paper, if libraries had excluded then from their collections at the time of their release, if librarians had argued against their selection and acquisition and preservation, if they were not preserved in libraries 40 years ago, would we still have them? Would their declassification have happened today? Continue reading
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